Florida No-Fault May Be Dead: PIP Repeal Bill Passes Both Houses

Key Takeaways

• In spring 2021, a comprehensive reform bill repealing Florida PIP passed both houses of the Florida legislature.
• The bill would have mandated bodily injury (BI) coverage for the first time in state history and codified Florida’s bad-faith case law.
• A compromise replacing PIP with $5,000 in mandatory MedPay failed in the House.
• Governor DeSantis ultimately vetoed the bill, and Florida’s PIP system survived — but the episode shows how fragile no-fault regimes are once legislatures sour on them.

What Happened in Tallahassee

Something very interesting happened last week in the Sunshine State. A comprehensive bill i) Mandating BI coverage for the first time in state history; ii) Legislatively approving Florida’s crazy bad-faith case law; and iii) Eliminating PIP passed both houses.

Where do I stand? I do both Plaintiff and Defense PIP in FLA, so I am saddened that my $3000 attorney fee and cost settlements may end. I also think the new bad faith statute will trip up insurance carriers more than the Harvey v. Geico standard. Also, eliminating threshold will lead to larger verdicts and more reversals where the jury find for Plaintiff on LOP medical bills but denies compensation for pain and suffering.

The PIP system is quite broken here, only beat out by the roofing cases and the out of control litigation on those matters. Yet, the way people drive in Florida, PIP is a very helpful coverage. There was a compromise bill that I thought would pass – it would replace PIP with $5,000 in mandatory Medpay coverage. The House did not want to pass it.

Long term, that would be preferable to the entire elimination of PIP. I wrote all the members of the House in Florida, but did not succeed in the enactment of a compromise bill.

The last step is for Gov. Ron DeSantis to either sign the bill, the veto the bill or do nothing…

What the Repeal Would Have Changed

To appreciate the stakes, start with what Florida PIP is: $10,000 in first-party personal injury protection benefits that follow the insured regardless of fault, paid at the statutory fee schedule. Florida — unlike New York — has never required drivers to carry bodily injury liability coverage, so for many crash victims, the at-fault driver’s PIP-backed policy is the only insurance in the picture.

The repeal bill would have flipped that architecture: mandatory BI limits in place of first-party PIP, plus a codified bad-faith regime governing how carriers must handle liability claims. Removing the no-fault threshold would also have opened the courthouse doors to suits that PIP’s verbal threshold previously screened out — which is exactly why I predicted larger verdicts and more appellate churn over verdicts awarding medical specials but nothing for pain and suffering.

Why a New York No-Fault Practitioner Watches Florida

New York and Florida are the two great laboratories of no-fault litigation, and the contrast is instructive. New York’s system, built on Insurance Law Article 51 and the regulation at 11 NYCRR Part 65, provides $50,000 in basic economic loss coverage, a serious-injury threshold for tort suits, and an enormous body of appellate law on fee schedule defenses, verification, and condition-precedent defenses. Florida’s system is leaner — $10,000, fee-schedule-driven, and historically fueled by one-way attorney fee awards that made small-dollar PIP suits economically viable.

When one state’s legislature concludes the whole apparatus should be scrapped rather than repaired, practitioners in the other state should pay attention. The legislative impulses are the same everywhere: fraud frustration, premium pressure, and litigation volume. New York has felt its own version of that impulse — most recently in the May 27, 2026 auto tort reform, which eliminated the 90/180-day serious-injury category and imposed a greater-than-50% fault bar for Article 51 auto cases commenced on or after the effective date. Legislatures do eventually act on auto-insurance systems they believe are misfiring.

The Postscript: The Veto

As it turned out, the bill never became law. Governor DeSantis vetoed it in June 2021, and Florida’s PIP system survived intact — $10,000 limits, fee schedule, and all. The compromise I advocated, swapping PIP for $5,000 in mandatory MedPay, never got traction in the House either.

But the underlying pressures did not go away, and the episode remains the closest a major no-fault state has come to outright repeal in decades. The lesson for everyone who works in this space: no-fault is a legislative creature, and what a legislature gives, a legislature can take away — sometimes in a single session.

Practice Pointers

• Carriers writing in multiple states should not assume regulatory stability; compliance and claims infrastructure built around PIP can become obsolete with one bill signing.
• Medical providers relying on first-party billing should understand that repeal converts their receivable from a regulated fee-schedule claim into a liability-side lien negotiation.
• New York practitioners should follow Albany the way Florida practitioners learned to follow Tallahassee — the 2026 reform proves the point.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Florida actually repeal no-fault insurance?

No. The repeal bill passed both houses of the legislature in 2021, but Governor DeSantis vetoed it. Florida’s $10,000 PIP requirement remains in effect, and bodily injury coverage remains optional for most Florida drivers.

How does Florida PIP differ from New York no-fault?

Florida PIP provides $10,000 in first-party benefits; New York provides $50,000 in basic economic loss under Insurance Law Article 51 and 11 NYCRR Part 65. New York also mandates bodily injury liability coverage and uses a serious-injury threshold to limit tort suits — a threshold New York’s 2026 tort reform narrowed further by eliminating the 90/180-day category.

Why would a state eliminate no-fault?

The recurring arguments are fraud, premium cost, and litigation volume — the same pressures that produced reform efforts in New York. Repeal advocates argue mandatory BI coverage with a bad-faith framework protects victims more efficiently than first-party PIP.

Related Resources

• Fee Schedule Defense in No-Fault Insurance — the firm’s cluster hub on fee schedule litigation
• The firm’s Legal Encyclopedia
• No-Fault Defense practice
• New York No-Fault Insurance Law
• Understanding IME No-Shows in New York No-Fault Insurance: Rights, Consequences, and Strategic Considerations
• Legislative changes affecting no-fault practitioners
• No-fault regulatory amendments and their impact
• No-Fault Verification Requirements: When Partial Compliance Isn’t Enough